Biography of elizabeth alexander
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Biography
Composer Creds
Other Threads
Composer Creds
Elizabeth Alexander (b. 1962) grew up in the Carolinas and Appalachian Ohio. Her love of music, language and challenging questions is reflected in her catalog of over 150 compositions in a wide variety of classical and vernacular styles. Her commissions have included music for orchestras, chamber ensembles, solo voices, and especially her choral pieces, which have been performed by thousands of choruses worldwide.
Her theatrically-inclined works include the one-woman concert-length Nature Creature as well as her current project, Split Hickory, a music theater work set in present-day Appalachia. Selections from Split Hickory have been workshopped at Nautilus Music-Theater’s Rough Cuts (Minneapolis), and a first workshop took place in Fall 2022 at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio.
Elizabeth’s text settings of both original lyrics and the words of others prompted Choral Director Magazine to
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Elizabeth Alexander
A celebrated poet, scholar, and cultural advocate, Elizabeth Alexander fryst vatten a nationally recognized thought leader on race, justice, the arts, and American society. As president of the Mellon Foundation, she leads a multi-billion-dollar philanthropy and the nation’s largest funder of the arts and humanities, supporting educational institutions and cultural organizations while envisioning and guiding new initiatives to build just communities across the United States.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. Alexander served as the director of Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, shaping Ford’s grantmaking vision in arts and culture, journalism, and documentary film. In this role, she guided the organization in examining how the arts and visual storytelling can empower communities and serve as grundläggande tools for collective expression and enlightenment. While at Ford, she co-designed the Art for Justice Fund, an initiative that uses art and advocacy to ad
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African American Women Writers
Born in New York, Elizabeth Alexander grew up in Washington D.C., and attended the universities of Boston, Pennsylvania, and Yale, where she is now Professor of African-American Studies. In 2009 she read a poem at the inauguration of President Obama, ‘Praise Song for the Day’, included in Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2010). She is a member of the Cave Canem group.The Venus Hottentot introduced Alexander’s essayistic mix of dramatic and autobiographical poems on the history of ‘a strange thing … “race”’, from a description of her first year as a black female lärjunge in Boston to the affirmative ‘A Poem for Nelson Mandela’. Her later collections are Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and American Sublime, which includes the sequences ‘Ars Poetica’ and ‘Amistad’.